Power Comes First
Rewiring the Republic, Column Zero: the strongest case against this entire series, and why I am writing it anyway.
A note from Lawrence
In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Florida voters restored the franchise to 1.4 million people with felony records. Seven months later, the legislature took it back from about 774,000 of them with an invoice. The reform passed. The reform lost. The gap between those two sentences is what my series Rewiring the Republic is about.
This column makes the strongest case against the whole project: that reform lists are wish lists, and that nothing on them happens without power. I agree, and I’m writing the series anyway. Every one of the forty-three reforms gets an honest scorecard, including the box the wish lists skip: what breaks it. Every rung on the ladder is copper until someone throws the switch.
